Many large scale computing platforms are designed to run increasingly large number of specialized applications. Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) are becoming common as enterprises look to cost-effectively increase their resources by converting their physical datacenters to a virtual infrastructure. This virtual infrastructure enables new approaches to application development, designed specifically to run in a software-defined data center, where all elements of the infrastructure, from networking, storage, CPU, and security, are virtualized and delivered as IT (information technology) as a service. These SDDCs are virtual datacenters may be designed to run tens or hundreds of thousands of application instances. The development process of such application and scale of these applications' deployment requires a different approach that supports the full lifecycle of the application, from initial development, through all testing stages, to deployment and scaling. This approach is therefore well suited to the continuous delivery strategy. Such application delivery platforms require high degree of agility and scalability to provide maximum value for the investment and rapid monitoring capabilities to react to constantly changing level of customer demand for the services that such applications offer. It is also important that the monitoring components of such agile application platforms were able to adjust to the continuously changing architecture and scale of such application development and delivery platform.
Monitoring and reporting (M&R) software is used with cloud computing platforms to retrieve information from various data sources to provide real-time, historical, and projected visibility into the performance of infrastructure and business services. The M&R multi-tier architecture is composed of modules that can be installed on a single server or be distributed and scaled over multiple servers. The M&R system can include collectors, which record data from the cloud computing platform and store data in databases. This M&R system can be used to produce system reports, alerts and logs from the data stored in the database. With comprehensive Web dashboards and targeted reports, the M&R can provide in real-time, the status of the managed infrastructure and business services. This information can be used to troubleshoot problems, understand trends, and verify compliance of service level agreements.
A problem with the data collector in the M&R system is that it must be manually configured to specify the data to be recorded by the data collector. This manual configuration requirement can lead to data not being recorded when the data transmitted by the cloud computing platform changes to metrics that are not in the data collection configuration or the cloud computing platform itself changes its configuration. The time needed to manually change the configuration settings will depend completely upon the availability of the system administrators and this new metric data will not be recorded until the collector is properly reconfigured to record the new metric data. It is not uncommon for several days to elapse before the configuration settings are manually corrected. Because a substantial amount of data may fail to be recorded, an automated system is needed, which automatically configures the data collectors used in M&R systems so that the collector will be able to record all desired data after the metrics have changed.